Okay, maybe make is not the operative word here. Eating pasta at home for me means just boiling the noodles and using ready-made sauces since I’m not allowed to cook in my dorm room. This is not such a bad arrangement, since I usually eat sandwiches or salads and am too busy to cook something from scratch anyway. Cooking for me is therefore a very simple affair: I have to limit myself to fare that can be boiled or steamed without giving off strong odors, or can be eaten straight out of a can or jar.

So when I hanker for a hot meal it’s usually steamed rice with something canned, or pasta and ready-to-eat sauce. If I want to have the latter, I usually cobble together a meal using Bravo’s garlic and spinach pesto and some canned spicy tuna in oil.

Filippo Berio’s sun dried tomato pesto was a happy accident – out of necessity I was forced to do my groceries at the neighborhood store which, apart from charging higher, does not stock my favorite Bravo pesto. I decided to try Filippo Berio, and I’ve been hooked on it ever since (the jar you see in the photo is my fourth one in two months). The sweetness of the sun-dried tomato is perfect, especially if complemented by chunks of spicy tuna and a few tablespoons of the tuna’s drippings. At P108 for a 190 gram jar, it’s also a lot cheaper than Bravo, which will set you back P285 for a 185g jar. A little of it also goes a long way. For each meal I only need two tablespoonfuls of the pesto.

For my pasta I also like to use fusilli pasta by Balducci, a brand whose Australian roots are belied by its Italian-sounding name. I like using Balducci’s fusilli because it’s cheap (only P40 for a 500g bag) but of good quality. Fusilli pasta is great for oil-based sauces like pesto because its screw-like turns trap a lot of sauce. It also looks a lot cuter than run-of-the-mill spaghetti or fettucini.

When I get tired of the sun-dried tomato variant, I might try Filippo Berio’s traditional pesto too. Until then, here’s to more rainy Tuesdays.